Exploring the Market with AI

So let's talk a little bit more about the business 0:00 and what it's all about before moving on to talk about 0:04 how I researched it, built the website and so forth. 0:07 so as I mentioned Spies in DC is a 0:12 it's kind of an educational service and it's a subscription 0:16 but it's a fixed period subscription meaning once somebody buys access 0:20 to Spies in DC or more commonly gifts it to another individual 0:25 the recipient will receive a series 0:30 of packages in the mail 0:33 approximately every two to three weeks or so. 0:37 When I say mail, I'm referring to actually your physical mailbox. 0:40 So the recipients will receive 0:45 basically a large format envelope, and inside it 0:49 there is a super secret, 0:52 if you will, manila envelope 0:55 with some historical documents, some context about the document. 0:58 It might be 1:03 a letter. 1:05 It might be a speech, things that. 1:06 There's an additional document that talks about 1:09 why this document or speech is important. 1:11 And the recipients also receive a couple 1:15 other cool things in each package, such as, for instance, stamps. 1:17 So I'm a big stamp collector. 1:21 I have been for a very long time. 1:23 And in the first package, 1:25 the recipients receive a this is a real Harry Truman 1:28 stamp. 1:33 And they also receive a Winston Churchill stamp because that first package 1:33 talks about Winston Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech. 1:38 Items are included in other later packages, such as, for example, 1:42 a real East German penny 1:46 or a pfennig, I guess, in German. 1:49 and of course to make this fun for me 1:52 personally i've i've had a spies in dc 1:55 stamp rubber stamp made i have a top secret stamp 1:59 of course to make this official things that right so it's an educational service 2:03 you're receiving physical documents in the mail every few weeks 2:08 along with some other cool items to make the whole experience 2:14 a little bit more fun stamps and coins and things that. 2:18 So what you're looking at 2:22 right now is the Spies in DC website, 2:24 which you can access by going to spiesindc.com. 2:28 And you can see, at least I hope, if I've accomplished my goal, 2:33 you can see that the website has been constructed in such a way 2:37 that make it look something 2:41 basically to be espionage-themed, right? 2:44 You're requesting clearance to the subscription. 2:48 I have some photos here which show, 2:52 at least give you a little more of an idea 2:57 about what you're going to receive or what your intended recipient 2:59 is going to receive. 3:03 It talks a little bit more about the different historical events 3:05 that are covered. 3:09 talks a little bit more about the two subscription options. 3:11 If I go into About, there's a little About section. 3:15 And of course, there's a subscription section, 3:19 which when somebody clicks on one of these two items, 3:23 they are taken to a Stripe checkout form 3:28 where they can input their credit card 3:32 or I think their Amazon Pay, things that. 3:35 Right? 3:39 It is critically important 3:41 for you to know that despite having been a programmer 3:43 all of my life I am most definitely not a designer 3:48 And in fact, have a hard time 3:53 even writing my name legibly, let alone 3:55 making a website design look interesting. 3:59 So with that said, you might be surprised to know 4:03 that everything you see here 4:05 from the background image 4:09 to the choice of font. 4:12 To the layout of these three images, these are just photos 4:15 that I took with my phone and then and then added to the code 4:19 added to the project to the cool 4:23 manila looking piece of paper here. 4:26 all of this, all of it, I can't stress this 4:29 enough, was created by artificial intelligence. 4:32 And I used a number of different tools to do this. 4:36 So for starters, 4:40 this background image that you see with the three mysterious 4:42 looking characters, that was done with a tool called DALL-E 4:46 And DALL-E is an artificial intelligence model 4:52 that is included with an OpenAI or ChatGPT subscription. 4:57 I pay $20 a month for this subscription. 5:04 And what it does is it gives me access 5:07 to, let me open up another chat here. 5:11 It gives me access to a number of different models right 5:16 so i would imagine everybody here is i'm quite familiar with the chat gpt model 5:22 or the gpt 4 or 4-5 now 5:28 or 4-0 model that is just it's an important part 5:32 but that's just part of the $20 a month chat gpt subscription 5:37 you get access to on these other models as well 5:41 including DALL-E 5:47 This is actually a private GPT from the GPT stores called Grimoire. 5:48 I've used it for some time now and it is a coding GPT. 5:53 So in the early days of my investigations regarding 5:58 how to use basically AI powered code assistants 6:02 I would regularly go into this interface 6:06 and interact with Grimoire. 6:10 These days, as we'll talk about shortly, I use something called Cursor. 6:13 But even today, now and then, I do return 6:18 to Grimoire to ask questions. 6:20 But returning to DALL-E, 6:23 let’s see, let me, 6:28 you can see I use this for all kinds of things. 6:30 I'll return here to the Cold War website background. 6:34 And usually this isn't the case, 6:37 but in this particular example, DALL-E created a perfectly, 6:40 at least to me, acceptable image based on two prompts. 6:45 So the first prompt is here. 6:49 It says, I am creating a website about the Cold War and want a background 6:51 image to display in the background of the website. 6:54 I had said hero, so meaning just the top, but it created one that 6:57 covers a little bit more 7:03 of the hero the hero being 7:04 just to clarify here what you see 7:08 when you load a webpage at the very top that's typically referred to as a hero 7:10 so I said please create an image that is evocative of Cold War drama 7:16 so I'm kind of thinking 7:20 something 7:22 that maybe reminds me of or the visitor 7:24 website visitor of the Americans TV show if you ever watched that which I really 7:27 So it created these and these are both really cool 7:32 And then I said, how about something a little more abstract, 7:36 right, that can be applied to this background? 7:40 And it created these. 7:42 And you can see here on the right, and I'll just jump back to 7:44 the website, you can see, in fact, that is the background 7:48 image I wound up going with. 7:53 I could never, 7:55 to be perfectly clear, in a million years have created something 7:57 as, in my humble opinion, as cool as that background image. 8:01 Right. So I had this background image. 8:07 And then as we'll talk about in in just a bit. 8:09 I use the the cursor coding tool 8:12 to build the pages and so forth. 8:16 right but i feel maybe in my excitement to talk about this project 8:20 i maybe put the cart before the horse if you will 8:24 because before i went down this path of creating a website 8:28 i wanted to do a little bit more research 8:34 into 8:37 whether this idea was viable in the first place, right? 8:40 First of all, what does a typical customer look , right? 8:46 First of all, they have to have an interest in, 8:50 I would suppose, Cold War history. 8:53 And then two, they perhaps have to receiving 8:56 interesting things in their mailbox, right? 9:02 So I knew I liked Cold War history, And I receiving things 9:05 in the physical mail, but do others, right? 9:10 I really had no idea. 9:14 So what I wanted to do was do a little bit more research 9:16 before I dived maybe a little too deep into this project. 9:19 And what I did is I used a tool called Gemini. 9:24 And Gemini is another AI tool 9:28 that is actually was created and managed by Google. 9:32 And you can see I am at Gemini.Google.com. 9:36 And I'm using in this example, 9:41 which I've pulled back up, Gemini Advanced Deep Research. 9:44 There are other models as well, but I use Gemini Advanced Deep Research. 9:49 And in this particular request, 9:54 I've asked Gemini to research 9:59 basically blog topics for history gifts. 10:02 Because what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to introduce people 10:07 who have an interest in history and then possibly Cold War history 10:10 and also receiving things in the mail. 10:15 I'm trying to create content that they might 10:17 subsequently find by searching on Google, right? 10:21 I think in this particular case, that's 10:25 easier said than done, right? 10:28 So I've asked, this was last month, 10:31 I asked Google Gemini to do a little bit of research for me 10:35 and give me some ideas for blog topics 10:40 that might pertain to history gifts. 10:43 and you can see here on the right 10:46 gemini has in fact done that unique gift ideas for men 10:49 who have everything that's probably a pretty good blog idea 10:52 the joys of reading and exploring history possibly interesting 10:56 i i always try and think if this was the blog post 11:01 title for example how would somebody search for that 11:04 and arrive on my blog page 11:09 as a result i not not entirely sure about that one 11:12 Nonetheless oh subscription boxes right 11:16 That an interesting point I hadn really thought of 11:19 Spies in DC in 11:24 terms of a subscription box, which have in recent years 11:26 become very popular, but that's interesting. 11:29 That kind of gives me a new angle 11:32 to think about marketing this project and so forth, 11:35 right unveiling the secrets of the cold war maybe maybe not 11:39 but nonetheless 11:44 that this tool does a tremendous tremendous job 11:45 of helping me kind of 11:49 maybe deepen my thinking 11:53 about a particular idea you can see here 11:56 I asked it a little bit more about historical document 11:59 subscription services because I didn't even know if, is this a thing? 12:03 , are there other businesses out there that are doing this? 12:07 And sure enough, Google Gemini advanced deep research and tells me 12:11 that there's another business out there called History by Mail, 12:17 something apparently called Historic Mail. 12:22 Oh, there's even a Smithsonian-related service as well, right? 12:25 So in the past, this is something that you would have done 12:30 by going to Google and then searching and then painstakingly compiling 12:33 all of this information together, Google 12:38 Gemini Deep Research can do all of that footwork for you. 12:42 And you can see here it's even summarized these three, I suppose, 12:45 competing services in a way that helps me 12:49 better frame my service, right? 12:53 I've always made it a point throughout my 12:56 life and career 13:00 creating things to not really pay too much attention 13:01 to what the competition is doing, because I've always focused on 13:04 trying to make the thing that I personally want to use. 13:07 And then if other others use it, great. 13:11 But nonetheless, I do think this is a great way to really 13:14 frame an idea and bring up 13:18 pros and cons that might not be so obvious from the beginning. 13:22 so again and i i you can see i have a i have a history here 13:26 there's all kinds of other stuff if i click on more but not sure 13:31 it's relevant i've used this tool on numerous occasions 13:35 to help me brainstorm about spies in dc help me better 13:40 frame the pricing the subscription terms and all of that sort of thing right 13:45 so let's kind of maybe take a moment to quickly recap here 13:50 we have we have this idea 13:54 to start some kind of project a new business 13:57 we can then go to gemini advanced as an example 14:01 there are other competing ai tools this but this just happens to be the one i use 14:06 and we can start asking it questions about this idea 14:12 help help me prove this idea out does this make sense is this something 14:15 does it already exist is this something that people might find 14:19 interesting, things that. 14:23 And then the next thing you want to do 14:25 is throw up some sort of marketing website. 14:28 And that's exactly what I did with Spies in DC. 14:31 So in the next video, we'll talk a little bit more 14:36 about how this website was created, going beyond just, 14:39 for example, the background image that was created through Dolly. 14:44 I'll talk a little bit more about Cursor and how I subsequently deployed 14:48 the website to the web for public access. 14:55

You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace

Sign up